A Monologue

This is my thought process while filling out the Rotary Youth Exchange country selection sheet. I still haven't finished it.

They gave me a list of countries and told me to number them by preference. Are they insane? I cannot, simply cannot, do this. On this whole, eighteen-page application, this will be the hardest thing to do. Harder than locating all my medical information and my dental information and my education information combined. I cannot pick because I want to go everywhere! I want to see them all! Can they do that for me? Send me everywhere? Probably not. No, it’d be far too expensive, and, you know, the costs of airfare are rising, just rocketing, shooting to phenomenal highs. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but not too much. I didn’t even get a job last summer! How could I afford to go everywhere? After all, I want to be teacher! I’ll make absolutely no money, I know. But, I also want to travel and go everywhere and meet everyone and even know everything! If I get reincarnated – not that I believe in anything so crazy, and not that reincarnation is a crazy idea, or anything – well, if that happened, I’d want to be an encyclopedia, or someone who had the time to read the encyclopedia. I’d actually choose to be the latter, because that way I would be a real person and could do things besides sit on a shelf. So maybe, I don’t want to be an encyclopedia. Just a smart person, even though I would like to say that I already am pretty dang smart, but not in a stuck-up way. Anyways, the kids are great, when you’re a teacher. Always happy to see you, always wanting a hug with their tiny, sticky, gooey, gluey arms. And then I get to share what I know and make them want to be smart too, which is great. Little bundles of pure joy, they are, at least, most of the time. Until someone takes their marker, or they scrape their knee, or you ask them to share, at which point they become little demons sent from hell to torture you personally. And, they won’t ever shut up. But, excluding those not-so-rare occasions, being a teacher is pretty rewarding. Really, I’d be an ESL teacher, sharing my language with kids in other countries. Wouldn’t that job be perfect, absolutely perfect for me? I’d get live somewhere not American, teach, and even teach English. Ideal, I’m telling you. A combination of all my passions. Traveling, English, and kids. Wait, s***, I still need to list the **** countries. I can’t list forty countries in order of preference. I cannot, simply cannot.

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I don't know when you posted this, or if you got in, but I hope you did! Two years ago I went through the same process. On my application I put "Argentina" but I ended up going to Thailand. So it goes. (:
My friend, on his Rotary Youth Exchange application, couldn't make up his mind. So he wrote his choices as North, South, East, and West. He ended up in Belgium.